Make-it-yourself mead, the gods' refresher

Updated 3:26 pm, Friday, January 11, 2013

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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MaryEllen Kirkpatrick goes through the steps of making melomel - a variation of ancient, legendary mead, but with fruit rather than just honey-sweetened water. It must sit for many months before it's drinkable; the bottles are from an earlier batch.

MaryEllen Kirkpatrick goes through the steps of making melomel - a variation of ancient, legendary mead, but with fruit rather than just honey-sweetened water. It must sit for many months before it's drinkable;

MaryEllen Kirkpatrick cuts up plums for making Plum Melomel at her home in San Francisco. She is making Plum Melomel from fermented honey and plums.

MaryEllen Kirkpatrick cuts up plums for making Plum Melomel at her home in San Francisco. She is making Plum Melomel from fermented honey and plums.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

Image 3 of 12

MaryEllen Kirkpatrick goes through the steps of making melomel - a variation of ancient, legendary mead, but with fruit rather than just honey-sweetened water. It must sit for many months before it's drinkable; the bottles are from an earlier batch.

MaryEllen Kirkpatrick goes through the steps of making melomel - a variation of ancient, legendary mead, but with fruit rather than just honey-sweetened water. It must sit for many months before it's drinkable;

MaryEllen Kirkpatrick pours honey into a bucket to weigh it at her home in San Francisco. She is making Plum Melomel from fermented honey and plums.

MaryEllen Kirkpatrick pours honey into a bucket to weigh it at her home in San Francisco. She is making Plum Melomel from fermented honey and plums.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

Image 5 of 12

MaryEllen Kirkpatrick goes through the steps of making melomel - a variation of ancient, legendary mead, but with fruit rather than just honey-sweetened water. It must sit for many months before it's drinkable; the bottles are from an earlier batch.

MaryEllen Kirkpatrick goes through the steps of making melomel - a variation of ancient, legendary mead, but with fruit rather than just honey-sweetened water. It must sit for many months before it's drinkable;

MaryEllen Kirkpatrick goes through the steps of making melomel - a variation of ancient, legendary mead, but with fruit rather than just honey-sweetened water. It must sit for many months before it's drinkable; the bottles are from an earlier batch.

MaryEllen Kirkpatrick goes through the steps of making melomel - a variation of ancient, legendary mead, but with fruit rather than just honey-sweetened water. It must sit for many months before it's drinkable;

The Yeast for making Plum Melomel in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, July 31st, 2012.

The Yeast for making Plum Melomel in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, July 31st, 2012.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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MaryEllen Kirkpatrick mixes yeast with water for making Plum Melomel at her home in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, July 31st, 2012.

MaryEllen Kirkpatrick mixes yeast with water for making Plum Melomel at her home in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, July 31st, 2012.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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MaryEllen Kirkpatrick measures water temperature for yeast rehydration at her home in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, July 31st, 2012. She is making Plum Melomel from fermented honey and plums.

MaryEllen Kirkpatrick measures water temperature for yeast rehydration at her home in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, July 31st, 2012. She is making Plum Melomel from fermented honey and plums.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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MaryEllen Kirkpatrick pours yeast into a bucket with crushed plums and honey at her home in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, July 31st, 2012. She is making Plum Melomel from fermented honey and plums.

MaryEllen Kirkpatrick pours yeast into a bucket with crushed plums and honey at her home in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, July 31st, 2012. She is making Plum Melomel from fermented honey and plums.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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Some earlier vintages of fruit Melomel made from honey and fruit made by MaryEllen Kirkpatrick in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, July 31st, 2012.

Some earlier vintages of fruit Melomel made from honey and fruit made by MaryEllen Kirkpatrick in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, July 31st, 2012.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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Make-it-yourself mead, the gods' refresher

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Before the Greek god Dionysus was knocking back wine, before Russians turned a potato into vodka, around 700 B.C. when King Midas ruled in what is now Turkey, the most popular party drink was mead.

Water sweetened with honey and allowed to ferment was quaffed by gods, royalty and commoners, according to the cave paintings, scrolls and drinking horns they left behind.

Roman warriors drank mead to get pumped up for battle. Odin, the king of the Viking gods, believed mead gave him poetic prowess. The Oracle of Delphi insisted she couldn't predict the future without drinking honey wine first, and the love goddess Aphrodite was said to take bribes of mead to help amorous ladies of the Greek upper class find their soul mates.

Although there are many who insist that beer came first, petroglyphs of honey hunters raiding hives in South Africa and Spain predate the time when farmers started cultivating wheat and barley in the Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago.

So in 2012, a year some said would be the planet's last, we decided to go back to the beginning and make some ancient hooch with honey from The Chronicle's rooftop beehives.

While the ancients probably first made mead by accident, after leaving a vessel with honey out in the rain, we decided to use food-grade equipment and an expert teaching duo: San Francisco beekeeper/trained chef/soap and candle maker MaryEllen Kirkpatrick and her husband, Doug, a physicist and winemaker. A power mead-couple if there ever was one.

Point of clarification: We added fruit to our honey wine mix, so technically it's called melomel, not straight mead. We added plums because we wanted a sweeter, more Muscat-like drink, and we liked the more festive cranberry color the plums would produce.

Into the bucket went 25 gallons of hand-smashed and pitted purple plums, 17 pounds of honey, about 6 gallons of water and yeast to ferment the honey's natural sugars into ethanol and carbon dioxide.

As I stirred the mix, the scent reminded me of making jam on the stove, but it looked repulsive, more like the contents of someone's stomach.

Over the next month, we checked the bucket, and punched down the "must" - the fruity skin bits that rose to form a skrim on the top.

When fermentation had slowed way down, we strained out the plums and tube-siphoned the juice into a 5-gallon glass carboy container corked with a bubble lock to allow the gas to escape.

Our melomel sat for six more months in this secondary fermentation phase, until the last of the silt-like sediment settled on the bottom and the melomel clarified enough to put it in bottles.

We used a cleaner called PBW, and a diluted sulfite solution to sanitize the bottles. When we were done siphoning the liquid into bottles, we had two cases.

But the bacchanalia will have to wait. Unlike beer and some wines, you can't drink mead right away. The first sip started out sweet, then finished with a white-lightning kick. I think I saw Doug choke and wipe away a tear.

Mead needs to lie down for up to three years before it's drinkable. The peach and the cherry melomel the Kirkpatricks made in 2009 is now delicious.

So we have plenty of time to come up with a name for our Chronicle mead. Any suggestions?